I’m sure you’ve heard that there’s more than one side to a story.

There’s your side, their side, and the truth.

No matter how good hearted we are, if we end up having to explain our side of things we’ll inevitably tell it so that we seem sympathetic. We are, after all, the heroes of our own story, fighting for good. We sometimes forget that we are also the villain of someone else story.

This can become complicated when it comes to media representations of conflict, as we’ve seen recently. The news, as much as we’d like it to be, isn’t always impartial, and what we see isn’t always the whole story. The issue has come up of civilian recordings of police activities in relation to incidents like that of Eric Garner, where recordings were made of his arrest that contradicted the police recountings. To know the whole story, in any incident, would take years. What we can know is limited to the perspectives of those present and by compiling stories we get a better idea of how things actually are. Or as close as we can get.

During the course of our lives we play many parts in many different stories. We are the prize in our parents quests for love and a family. We are the tragic hero of our teenage years. We are the side kick in our best friends journey through life. We are the bastard who cut someone off in traffic on the worst day of their life. We are the wise mentor, the nemesis, the love interest, the boss, the underdog. It all depends how you tell things.

We see narrative as a retelling of a sequence of events that have a cause and effect.

But the way we show those events, the events we show and the ones we leave out, all twist what kind of story we are in and what role we play.

So, what kind of story is your life?

Overcoming the Monster?
Rags to Riches?
The Quest?
Voyage and Return?
Comedy?
Tragedy?
Rebirth?

Depending on how you tell it, it might be all seven.